Nearly half of US Gen Z now has a diagnosed mental health condition. But this might be the most sane reaction from a generation that has lived through a global pandemic, a collapsing climate and two years of a genocide broadcast live on their phones, with hardly any language to communicate this grief beyond diagnosis and therapytok.
This is officially Gen Z’s “breakout summer,” according to a widely shared Vox piece published this month that made the case plainly: performative pessimism is out, and joy is back. If you are chronically online, it’s hard to miss the evidence. Spider-Man: Brand New Day broke opening-weekend box office records, and five films have crossed a billion dollars globally this year, at a moment when the industry was supposed to be dying. In New York, crowds packed the streets for weeks straight, first for the Knicks’ championship run, then again when the World Cup wrapped up just across the river. On TikTok, “line culture” has become its own genre: young people queuing for hours, together, for drops and pop-ups, treating the wait as the point. This is the same generation that spent years being diagnosed with pandemic doomscrolling and “2016 nostalgia,” now being written up as proof that the malaise has finally broken.
There’s a real shift happening, and it’s good to see more young people outside, off their phones, touching grass ( literally, and I’m one of them). But the same summer this joy is being documented, 46% of Gen Z reportedly carry a diagnosed mental health condition, and nearly half of 18-29 year olds say they’d rather live in the past than the present, according to an NBC News poll released this spring. The World Health Organization has called loneliness a global health threat, linking it to an estimated 871,000 deaths a year worldwide — roughly 100 every hour, with young people and people in lower-income countries hit hardest. And in April, the singer Kehlani, who had recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, told Vibe magazine that the single biggest trigger for the worst period of her life wasn’t a breakup or a professional setback. It was watching the genocide in Gaza unfold in real time. “Watching babies get blown to bits should do something to you,” she said.
After a pandemic that literally stole our early twenties, a climate crisis with no end in sight, two and a half years of a televised genocide and the rise of fascism across the world, I argue that the real crisis did not disappear simply because movie theatres are full again. It went underground, because there was never really going to be a collective way to hold grief on this scale in a hypercapitalist culture that has become very good at turning collective suffering into an individual problem you can easily solve if you can afford a BetterHelp subscription or a Wellbutrin prescription.
I’ve personally lived with diagnosed severe high-functioning depression on and off for years, much of it tangled up with the work I do as a journalist. Wellbutrin has, in one way or another, saved my life, so I’m not saying medication itself is the problem. But like most people who couldn’t look away, as Kehlani said, watching the remains of decapitated babies in plastic bags, among other things, changed something in me that I don’t think “anxiety” or “burnout” fully covers. There’s a specific kind of numbness that sets in when you’ve watched more suffering than a person is built to take in, and the culture around us has mostly learned to pathologise that response instead of asking what it might be telling us. In Britain, the number of antidepressant items prescribed each year more than tripled between 1998 and 2018, from 18.4 million to 70.9 million, and more than one in five UK adults now takes a psychiatric drug in any given year, up over 500% since 1980. And yet, as the psychiatrist and anthropologist James Davies lays out in Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis (2021), rates of mental illness haven’t fallen alongside all that medication. They’ve kept climbing, in both number and severity. Meanwhile, the global antidepressant market was worth roughly $18 billion last year and is projected to keep growing. Someone is profiting from a crisis that keeps getting bigger no matter how much we spend treating it, and it’s rarely the person sitting in the fifteen-minute appointment.
But beyond the exploitation of a mental health crisis by the pharmaceutical industry, what concerns me is that diagnosis and treatment have become the only framework we have left. When the entire vocabulary available to a generation for describing grief, rage and moral injury is clinical, everything gets sorted into “disorder” or “wellness,” with nothing left in between — no way to say that watching children die and feeling something shatter in you might not be a malfunction at all. It might be closer to a working conscience doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
As someone who has both benefited fairly from antidepressants and is also aware of how convenient it can be for a system to sedate a feeling rather than sit with what actually caused it, I went looking outside the language of Western pathology for a way to name what I was carrying, and found it, oddly enough, close to home — through people like the great American writer James Baldwin, who said once, in an interview near the end of his life, that love has never been a popular movement — that most people, if they’re honest, have never really wanted to be free, because the world is held together only by the love and the passion of a very small number of people who refuse to fall into despair. And I also learned to understand this through feminist activist bell hooks’ work, who in All About Love: New Visions takes love out of the realm of something that simply happens to us, and describes love as “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” She goes further: “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will,” meaning that love is not just something we feel, but something we decide to do, through care, commitment, responsibility and action. Neither of them was writing about therapy. They were writing about what it costs to stay open to other people’s suffering in a world that keeps giving you reasons to close off.
There’s another scholar who has spent his career translating and defending exactly this argument, at the level of a specific, living religious tradition rather than borrowed spiritual language. Omid Safi is a professor of Islamic mysticism at Duke University, and his 2018 book, Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition, makes the case that ‘eshq — usually translated as radical love — isn’t sentiment. It’s treated as the actual structural force holding reality together, with grief and heartbreak built into it, not managed away from it. I’m not Muslim, and I want to be careful here, because there’s a real fault line running through how this tradition gets talked about in the West: Sufism is often presented as separable from Islam, available to anyone regardless of faith. That’s a popular reading, and it’s the exact reading Safi has spent much of his career arguing against — in essays like “Good Sufi, Bad Muslims,“ he makes the case that Sufism is tasawwuf, the inner dimension of Islam itself, rooted in the Quran, not something you can extract from it and still call it what it is.
But unlike the Western therapeutic model, which often treats emotional regulation and self optimisation as the answer to human suffering, Safi’s tradition does not ask you to regulate your way out of grief over genocide. It asks what you are going to do with a heart that has been broken open by it, and sees that breaking as meaningful, sometimes even as a call to act, rather than something you are supposed to fix and move past.
And this is why I partly think the Gen Z “breakout summer” framing quietly avoids something. The psychoanalyst Joseph Dodds has written about exactly this tension, what he calls, half-seriously, dancing at the end of the world, arguing that joy in the middle of catastrophe isn’t automatically denial, it can be one of the things that actually sustains people through it. I don’t disagree. But a generation that spent two years unable to look away from Gaza doesn’t stop carrying that just because the news cycle moved on to summer blockbusters. If anything, the reckoning usually starts after the crisis leaves the headlines and you’re left with just what it did to you. So whatever this summer’s mood is, it isn’t a generation that got over something. It’s a generation that’s exhausted, and joy and exhaustion aren’t opposites they can, and often do, sit right next to each other. What I don’t think we’ve built is anywhere for that feeling to go except into a diagnosis. Safi’s tradition, and Baldwin’s work, and Bell Hooks’, all say roughly the same thing from different centuries and different faiths: the heartbreak isn’t the malfunction. The absence of anywhere to put it is.